30 years after skinheads beat to death immigrant on Portland street, city reflects

As a youth, Nkenge Harmon Johnson remembers getting off the MAX train or bus in downtown Portland and being careful not to cut across Pioneer Courthouse Square.

It was the late 1980s or 1990s. Harmon Johnson is black.

“It was not safe for me and my friends,” said Harmon Johnson, now president and CEO of the Urban League of Portland. “Because Aryans, neo-Nazi skinheads held court in Pioneer Square. They hung out on the steps and smoked and chatted.”

Three decades later, downtown still doesn’t feel safe to some African Americans.

Harmon Johnson recalls a recent message she read on an email list-serve sent among friends. It warned her and other black people to stay away that day because the Proud Boys were marching through the street. The self-proclaimed gun-owning Western chauvinists have become known for their violent confrontations.

Harmon Johnson is one of a group of activists, community leaders and policymakers who are reflecting on how Oregon has evolved – or not – since Mulugeta Seraw was murdered 30 years ago Tuesday.

Seraw, a 28-year-old Ethiopian immigrant, was surrounded and bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat by three skinheads on a Southeast Portland street on Nov. 13, 1988.

Harmon Johnson’s Urban League of Portland is organizing a conference at Portland State University this week to focus on Seraw’s death and the future of Oregon. The conference’s theme is “Remember. Learn. Change.”

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What has changed? “The date on the calendar,” Harmon Johnson said.

The brutality of Seraw’s death shook many. He was an immigrant fleeing violence from his own country who came here to get a college education and live the American dream when he was attacked for no other reason than neo-Nazis didn’t like who he was.

It stunned white people – “there was no way for people to explain it away,” Harmon Johnson said.

Mulugeta Seraw

But to black people, Harmon Johnson said, it didn’t seem as astounding because it fit the reality of a Portland they’d come to know through repeated experiences with racial aggression.

Then last year, Harmon Johnson again saw shock among white people and less surprise from minority communities when police say Jeremy Christian fatally stabbed two men in the neck and nearly killed a third on a MAX train. The men intervened as Christian directed a racist and xenophobic tirade at two African American teens, witnesses said.

“People say, ‘Oh my gosh. How could this happen in Portland -- not loving, progressive Portland,’” Harmon Johnson said. “And (we) say … ‘What do you mean how can this happen in Portland?’ We know this can happen because white supremacists are allowed to roam free in ways that are entirely inappropriate.”

Harmon Johnson cited as an example Portland police not arresting Christian the night before the attack, when an African American woman said he delivered a hate-filled rant against blacks, Jews and Muslims, then threatened to kill her and threw a Gatorade-filled plastic bottle at her face. Police responded to the Rose Quarter MAX station but let Christian go. Later, police issued a statement disagreeing with the woman's account that she'd identified Christian as her attacker.

Police said she hadn't. Harmon Johnson also pointed to the Portland Police Bureau's two-decades-old practice of keeping a list of suspected gang members and affiliates. An Oregonian/OregonLive investigation in 2016 found 81 percent of the 359 people on the list were racial or ethnic minorities. The bureau eliminated the list last year under public criticism, but an auditor later found police were keeping a second list of suspected gang members.

Harmon Johnson said police unfairly focus on younger, minority men who they think are in gangs, yet they pay little attention to white gangs with supremacist ties.

The same goes for federal authorities, who ignore white supremacists when creating terrorist lists, she said. The New York Times reported this month that the federal government's counterterrorism strategy has focused for nearly 20 years almost exclusively on Islamic militants and not white supremacists and members of the far right -- even though they've killed far more people since Sept. 11, 2001, than Islamic or other domestic extremists.

“White supremacists are terrorists,” Harmon Johnson said.

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Kenneth Mieske, the 23-year-old who fatally struck Seraw, was sentenced to life for murder and died in 2011 at age 45 while imprisoned. Accomplice Kyle H. Brewster ended up serving more than 13 years before his release in 2002 and accomplice Steven R. Strasser served more than a decade before getting out of prison in 1999.

Although he was never prosecuted, a fourth man -- Tom Metzger -- had to pay for what a Multnomah County Circuit Court civil jury later determined was his role in the death. Metzger was a founder of the California-based group White Aryan Resistance.

The jury awarded Seraw’s family $12.5 million after making a landmark finding that Metzger was vicariously liable for Seraw’s death by sending a recruiter to Portland to mentor a local branch of skinheads, the East Side White Pride. The jury agreed that Metzger encouraged the three members to unleash violence on non-whites.

The family ultimately collected a fraction of the verdict -- after Metzger was forced to sell his Southern Californian house -- but it was enough to cripple Metzger’s racist organization and provide a nest egg for Seraw’s 10-year-old son. One of Seraw’s civil lawyers, James McElroy, adopted the boy. Today, Seraw’s son is a commercial airline pilot.

Elden Rosenthal, another of the lawyers who represented Seraw’s family, said he saw Metzger and his white nationalist views at the time as on the fringe -- extreme and rare.

“I just thought he was with this minuscule minority of people,” said Rosenthal, who lost members of his Jewish family to the Holocaust. “Now we know he was just the tip of the iceberg.”

Rosenthal said he believes President Donald Trump has encouraged a rise in racist rhetoric. Trump has come under a near-constant barrage of criticism for his comments on Latin Americans, his administration's Muslim ban, calling the immigrant caravan an "invasion" and holding rowdy "build-the-wall" rallies.

“It’s the same messaging,” Rosenthal said.

Rosenthal recently re-read a transcript of Metzger’s closing arguments during the 1990 civil trial. He said he was astonished to see much of what Metzger told jurors seems to mirror Trump’s words and those of his supporters.

Metzger spoke of his “nice little” California neighborhood as having been “destroyed” by an “invasion” of Mexicans. Metzger said America was changing for the worse. Metzger worried for the plight of white, working-class Americans – and said many people felt exactly as he did, Rosenthal recounted.

“There is a growing underclass of white people in this country,” Metzger said. “They are dropping through the grating. They are becoming poorer and poorer and poorer. And they don’t like what’s happening in this country.”

Given Trump’s political success, Rosenthal said he’s come to recognize that such nationalist views are part of a mainstream segment of society.

“These things can happen here, right in progressive, sanctuary city Portland, because there are people like this all around and we can’t ignore it,” said Rosenthal, still a lawyer working in Portland.

“It can happen here, it did happen here and it will happen again if we don’t educate our children,” he said. “It’s the job of a progressive civilization to always be on the alert and always whack it down when it rears its head.”

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Randy Blazak has spent the last three decades studying hate groups and is chairman of the Oregon Coalition Against Hate Crime. Amid calls like Rosenthal’s for vigilance, Blazak also sees promising developments in a state that’s overwhelmingly white.

Community members have increasingly been willing to speak out, Blazak said. After Jeremy Christian was arrested, people held candlelight vigils and wrote messages of love and racial harmony at the Hollywood MAX station, he noted.

“The whole community came out,” Blazak said. “That’s important for two reasons: It shows the victims that ‘we may not look like you or pray with you, but we stand with you.’ It also sends a message to the perpetrator that ‘we may look like you, but we’re not with you.’”

Such shows of support have surfaced in rural, more conservative corners of the state, too, Blazak said.

He pointed to John Day in 2010, when the Aryan Nations expressed interest in buying property there for its new national headquarters. The Aryan Nations ended up abandoning the idea after hundreds of residents showed up at a town hall meeting to express their outrage.

“It was so inspiring,” Blazak said.

Police in Portland have developed plans and training to try to address racial profiling and implicit bias, community groups have worked with police to increase understanding between officers and LGBTQ people and prosecutors charge people who target others because of their race, gender identity, religion or other differences, he said.

State lawmakers passed the state’s first “intimidation” laws in the 1980s.

“Part of it is trying to send a message,” Blazak said of the prosecutions.

In 2017, a white man told an African American man that he was "in the wrong neighborhood" in Northeast Portland and tried to sic a pitbull on him. Mathu Karcher, the white man, was convicted of second-degree intimidation in February and served 16 days in jail.

Also last year, a Portland driver yelled at a pregnant Muslim woman to remove her hijab and then pretended to shoot her and her husband by mimicking a gun with his fingers. Fredrick Sorrell was convicted of second-degree intimidation in August. He was ordered to take anger management classes and have a meaningful discussion with members of Portland's Muslim community.

“We won’t tolerate someone in any protected class being attacked -- and if we can prosecute it, we absolutely will,” said Brent Weisberg, a spokesman for the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office.

“We always want individuals to contact law enforcement when they think they might be victims of a hate crime,” Weisberg said. “That is something that is a priority for our office.”

The Urban League’s Harmon Johnson believes such prosecutions of hate-filled people who threaten but don’t physically harm others are an exception, not the rule. Too often, the reports get shrugged off and people stop turning to police when they’re victimized, she said.

She described an Urban League employee who was threatened by a man with a knife as he shouted out racial slurs. But when the employee called police, officers failed to investigate, Harmon Johnson said.

“These people are emboldened because they get away with it,” Harmon Johnson said. “And many people don’t report it because their response is they think police aren’t going to do anything about it.”

Blazak, however, thinks noticeable progress has occurred since Seraw’s death.

“There’s all these reasons to be skeptical,” Blazak said. “There’s lots of institutional racism.”

Blazak, who is white, spent his childhood in the 1970s in Georgia, before ultimately settling in the Northwest as an adult.

“I grew up in a town where the cops and the Klan were the same people,” Blazak said. “But the change I’ve seen in my life, I’m encouraged.”

Remembrance events

Tuesday, Nov. 13 marks 30 years since Mulugeta Seraw was murdered with a baseball bat in Southeast Portland by racist skinheads. The community is marking the anniversary in various ways:

* The Urban League of Portland is sponsoring the “Mulugeta Seraw Commemoration Conference” on Tuesday from 9 a.m. - 2 p.m.

* Wednesday, 8:50 a.m.: Unveiling of “sign toppers” that will mark the street corners around Southeast 31st Avenue and Pine Street, the location where Seraw was fatally beaten. The “toppers” will be attached to street signs in the immediate area, and display Seraw’s photo and name.

* Wednesday, 2 p.m.: The Portland City Council will be presented with a proclamation in remembrance of Seraw.